Grant: Project Grant - PA: Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes

Kidney disease is one of the most devastating complications of diabetes. We urgently need new treatments. Sometimes kidney disease in diabetes develops gradually over years. This is called chronic kidney disease. We have a number of treatments that can slow the development of chronic kidney disease in diabetes. At other times, kidney damage can occur quickly, for example if a person has major surgery or if a person gets sick for another reason. This is called acute kidney injury or AKI. People with diabetes are at much higher risk of developing AKI than people without diabetes. However, unlike chronic kidney disease, there are no particular treatments that stop AKI. Our team has discovered a promising new way to limit kidney damage caused by AKI in diabetes. Our strategy to stop AKI in diabetes is to block a protein called STING. STING is like a master controller. It is present in our cells but usually it stays quiet. When cells get damaged, STING turns on like a GO traffic signal and it tells cells to turn on genes that ultimately worsen kidney damage. In this project we will examine how STING causes kidney damage in diabetes and AKI and we will use this information to test new treatment opportunities. We will do this using cells grown in Petri dishes, mice with diabetes and AKI and tiny pieces of human kidney tissue. If the experiments are successful they could pave the way to a whole new treatment approach to reduce kidney disease in diabetes that focuses on preventing or treating AKI.